Budding entrepreneur or established startup founder? Whether you have an idea and wonder if it’s worth developping or you need to accelerate and are looking to raise funds,

Paris Pionnières will help you become a champion of the French Tech scene. The leading incubator for women founders offers you tailor-made services for every step of your startup’s growth and valuable insights into your everyday challenges.

At Paris Pionnières, you will find tailored programs, access to best practices, legal counselling and mentoring adapted to your needs. You will also have access to a work space: the contacts you will make with other entrepreneurs will help you move forward in a nurturing environment of shared motivation, synergies and informal discussions.

Paris Pionnières has an open approach to innovation. It encourages innovative ideas wether in the technological field or the social field: new services or business models leading to new consumer usages.

Paris Pionnieres is a unique place to be and the most gender balanced incubator in Paris!

Founded on March 8th 2005, the incubator has supported some 200 startups and shows a sustainability rate of 85%. We are a non-profit organization, therefore we take no share in the startups. Our service fees are billed to the startups and partly financed by public funding from the City of Paris (Paris Innovation Amorçage).

Our incubator is certified by the City of Paris as ‘Paris Innovation’ which guarantees quality of service and allows our startups access to specific seed funding “Paris Innovation Amorçage”. This fund is a joint venture between the City of Paris and the BPI (Public Investment Bank).

PIA offers a subsidy of up to 30 000€ for the first year of incubation, and repayable advances of a maximum of 100 000€, for the second and third years.

Our programs are tailored for every step in the growth of your project (concept, launching, development)

What is INNOVATION?

Your are tired of hearing that your project is no innovation? Do terms like “social innovation” or “innovation in usage” confuse you? We have put together a quizz to help you understand these different concepts.

– Is it an invention?

No. Inventions are not required to innovate. Kodak invented digital photography but did not put it on the market, and Apple did not invent mp3 devices…. More than the invention in itself, it is the capacity to make people adopt your product or your service which makes it an innovation.

– Is it a new idea?

Of course, but having a great idea is not enough, unfortunately. It must be the good idea at the right time. In 1979, the Englishman Kane Kramer got the idea of a portable music device, that you would be able to connect to a remote store through your telephone line. The device was called IXI, and looked a lot liike an iPod. Kramer was imagining music downloading well before the word ever existed! He was too much ahead of his time, out of context. his His patent expired without producing any revenue. His idea became an innovation when Apple launched the iPod+iTunes store, when the environment was ready for it.

– Is it a technology patent?

Not a must. Patented technologies can, of course, add value to a startup. However, some of the greatest successes of the past years are based on a new usage of an existing technology or combines them to solve problems which they couldn’t address individually. Air BnB started competing with the hospitality industry by connecting people. Uber combined geolocalisation and peer-to-peer to revolutionize transport. Innocent industrialized smoothies for the mass market and Videdressing.com gave access to the reselling of clothes online. In all of these, no real new technology was developed, and rather the concept and the capacity to address the market were key.

– Is it being a good manager?

Being a good manager is important to develop your business but in the early stages of a startup the ability to visualize, conceptualize, convince, and stir the interest is so much more important than managing and organizing. In other words when launching it is more important to be leader rather than a manager. In any case, whatever your situation, you do not need to have all skills. Firstly, some of them you can learn and secondly you can rely on others. For example, Paris Pionnières offers workshops which can give you some basic tools but it can also assist you in finding the adequate talents to help you.